Quesada, Ernesto (1858–1934)

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Quesada, Ernesto (1858–1934)

Ernesto Quesada (b. 1 June 1858; d. 7 February 1934), Argentine scholar and diplomat. Quesada, the son of Vicente G. Quesada and Elvira Medina, was born in Buenos Aires. He studied at the Colegio San José, then went to Europe to continue his education. Upon his return, he enrolled in the Colegio Nacional, and from there went to the University of Buenos Aires, where he received a law degree in 1882. Quesada taught foreign literature at the Colegio Nacional from 1881 to 1884. When his father was Argentine ambassador to the United States (1885–1892), Quesada and his wife, Eleonora Pacheco, spent most of 1885 sightseeing there, and he studied American literature before leaving for Europe at the end of the year.

Quesada was devoted to his father, accompanying him on his numerous trips abroad and often serving as his interpreter and secretary. Father and son collaborated on many publications; thus, the works of each contain references to those of the other. Quesada's articles on contemporary intellectuals relied on notes made after hearing them at informal gatherings. He helped his father publish Virreinato del Río de la Plata, 1776–1810 (1881), and together they edited the Nueva revista de Buenos Aires (1881–1885). The son was not active in politics, but he briefly was a supporter of Miguel Juárez Celman before joining the Unión Cívica Radical. From 1893 to 1895 he was editor of the newspaper El Tiempo, in which many of his essays first appeared.

Quesada was not only a journalist and polemicist but also a distinguished lawyer and public servant. A strong supporter of Pan-Americanism, he was elected president of the Argentine delegation to the Pan-American Scientific Congress in 1915. That year Harvard University appointed him professor of history and Latin American economy, beginning in 1916, but for an unexplained reason he never appeared in Cambridge. He became professor of international law and treaties at the University of Buenos Aires in 1919.

From 1904 to 1923 Quesada was professor of sociology at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1907 he was named professor of political economy at the Law Faculty of the University of La Plata. In his lectures he stressed the need for social legislation and an examination of labor conditions. In 1908, at the request of the Law Faculty, he examined the methods of faculty promotion and history teaching at twenty-two German universities. During this investigation he met Karl Lamprecht, head of the Institute of World History and Civilization at the University of Leipzig. Lamprecht's institute probably was Quesada's model for the Institute of Historical Investigations, which he helped establish at the University of Buenos Aires. Quesada's second wife, Leonore Niessen Deilers, undoubtedly was instrumental in his decision to give his library—consisting of 60,000 books, 18,000 manuscripts, and the thirty unpublished volumes of his father's memoirs—to the University of Berlin. The university created the Ibero-American Institute to house it, and began publishing a journal, Ibero-Amerikanische Archiv. Quesada retired to Spiez, Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This biographical sketch is based primarily on Juan Canter, "Bio-Bibliografía de Ernesto Quesada," in the University of Buenos Aires's Boletín del Instituto de investigaciones históricas 20, nos. 67-68 (January-June 1936): 343-722. The bibliographical essay, with many annotated entries, begins on 551. See also Rómulo D. Carbia, Historia crítica de la historiografía argentina (desde sus orígenes en el siglo XVI) (1940).

Additional Bibliography

Lanús, Juan Archibaldo. Aquel apogeo: Política internacional argentina, 1910–1939. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2001.

Zimmermann, Eduardo A. Los liberales reformistas: La cuestión social en la Argentina, 1890–1916. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana: Universidad de San Andrés, 1995.

Joseph T. Criscenti

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture